The No. 1 Skill Eric Adams Is Looking For (It’s Not on a Résumé)

The mayor-elect of New York City wants his top officials to be emotionally intelligent, characterizing it as his “No. 1 criteria.”

When Eric Adams was looking for someone to lead the nation’s largest police force, he considered some of the typical credentials, like relevant work experience and educational attainment. But he ranked another trait high on that list: “emotional intelligence.”

When he named David Banks as chancellor of the nation’s largest school system, Mr. Adams suggested that Mr. Banks exemplified emotional intelligence, something he argued would gird the new schools chief for the “battle” ahead. And when he named someone on Thursday to run New York City’s troubled jail system, he again said his pick, Louis Molina, was “emotionally intelligent.”

Mr. Adams, the mayor-elect of New York City, says that attribute is a prerequisite to winning a job in the highest echelons of city government. It is a phrase that Mr. Adams said New Yorkers should get used to hearing — a term that, divorced from its academic underpinnings, is something akin to “people skills.”